Police questioned Kavanaugh after bar fight in 1985: report

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NEW YORK – Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was involved in an altercation at a bar when he was an undergraduate student at Yale and was accused of throwing ice on another patron, according to a police report obtained by The New York Times.

Kavanaugh and four other men were questioned by the New Haven, Connecticut, police department as a result of the incident in September 1985, the Times reports. Kavanaugh was a junior at Yale at the time.

The police report referred to the altercation as “an assault,” according to the Times. There is no indication that charges were filed, and the report did not say whether anyone was arrested.

A 21-year-old man accused Kavanaugh of throwing ice on him “for some unknown reason,” according to the report. A witness reportedly said that Chris Dudley, a close friend of Kavanaugh’s who has come out in support of his nomination, then hit the man in the ear with a glass.

The victim, Dom Cozzolino, “was bleeding from the right ear,” according to the report, and later was treated at a local hospital.

Dudley denied the accusation to the police, and Kavanaugh did not want “to say if he threw the ice or not,” the Times reports. The incident reportedly occurred at a bar called Demery’s.

Dudley has spoken out in support of Kavanaugh’s nomination, and on Monday the White House released joint statements from him and a former Yale suitemate, Dan Murphy, rebutting any claims that Kavanaugh drank to the point of blacking out.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests from the Times for comment on Monday. Dudley also did not respond to the Times, and Cozzolino declined to comment to the newspaper.

Chad Ludington, a former classmate of Kavanaugh’s, has said Kavanaugh did not tell the truth about his drinking in his testimony Thursday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In Ludington’s statement released Sunday he also mentions an altercation involving Kavanaugh: “On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face.”

Ludington told CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” anchor Chris Cuomo that the altercation happened after a UB40 concert, when he and a group of friends were drinking at Demery’s.

They were sitting near a man who they thought looked like the lead singer of UB40, Ali Campbell, and were trying to figure out whether it was him, Ludington told Cuomo.

The man noticed Ludington, Kavanaugh and the others looking at him and — according to Ludington — aggressively asked them to stop.

Ludington told Cuomo he initially remembered Kavanaugh then threw his beer at the man, but recently found out from the report that there were ice cubes in the thrown drink.

“We weren’t drinking water, so it must’ve been some sort of mixed drink,” Ludington told Cuomo.

The man next then “took a swing at Brett,” Ludington continued, and then they were “two guys fighting — that was all very quick.”

Dudley then took his drink and “proceeded to smash it up against the guy’s head,” Ludington recalled.

There was some shouting, and then the police showed up, Ludington said. They looked around and asked questions, he said, and then Dudley was put in a squad car and taken to jail.